The Beckoning Silence (19 page)

I think that most climbers believe that style, ethics and morality are fundamental to the future of our sport. I wonder what non-climbers make of us when they hear of these incidents occurring on Everest and believe that this is what mountaineering is really about.

One simple fact remains true whatever other debates may have been stimulated by this sort of behaviour. Climbers would not like their own corpses, or those of their father, son, wife, brother or lover, to be treated in such a manner, so they have absolutely no right to treat George Mallory in this way. To me, it amounted to little more than modern-day grave robbing.

The feelings this behaviour evoked in me – a mixture of revulsion and sadness – seemed to compound my already uncertain emotions about climbing. Tat’s death in Greece five months later was the final straw. Ray and I would climb the few routes on our private tick list and be done with it.

I looked again at the handsome photograph of Mallory and thought of him moving with ineffable grace, thought of his flame-like vitality making no movements that were not in themselves beautiful. That was how I would remember him.

8 The stretched dream

I was idly flicking through a dictionary of quotations looking for inspiration when my eyes were drawn to the section on youth and old age.

‘Youth is not a time of life … it is a state of mind. It is not a matter of ripe cheeks, red lips and supple knees … it is a temper of the will, a quality of the imagination, a vigour of the emotions … it is a freshness of the deep springs of life.’
Unknown
.

‘Oh really?’ I thought, as I examined a furry tongue and the glazed eyes of a post-fortieth birthday morning. My cheeks, far from being ripe, seemed unduly fevered and as for supple knees, mine creak. Forty. Today I am forty. God’s teeth! Who would ever have thought it? Time for the bag over the head and the slow slide into decrepitude.

People chatter on about how life begins at forty and I mutter that only people over forty would ever utter such tosh. Of course life does not begin at forty – it just begins to show. At forty you are halfway towards the grave; some beginning! Life changes at forty. I’ll give you that.

What is it that is better after turning forty? For the life of me I cannot say: a belly heading inexorably towards my toes; hairy nostrils and tufty ears; aching injuries and grey hairs.

What about the thinking parts – the insidious slide towards totally reactionary thought without any apparent reason, shouting at news commentators and journalists’ scribbles in outrage when for the past four decades I never gave a damn. My passions were once fuelled by the irrational escapist stunts of carefree youth but now I am reduced to muttering incomprehensibly at the television, aroused and irate but too apathetic to do anything about it.

Why spend the first part of one’s life living on the edge of everything, having those brilliant ideas that spring to mind soon after eating the worm at the bottom of the Tequila bottle, rocking the Kasbah and trying to sink the boat and then spend the second half too stressed to change your toothpaste? Where did it all go?

As a callow youth all my illnesses were self-inflicted and worth it – to a degree, I suppose. A year and a half on crutches, nine operations, all those scars and stitches, pins, plates, wires and nails – no, they were not much fun or worth much at all. Nor the morphine and the sweet stench of anaesthetic gas as I wheezed into a conscious agony, or the sour smell of old plaster casts and the wire-taut pain of physiotherapy. But hell, think of the
craic
we had, the tales we told, laughing all the way to the operating table. It was grand – sure it was – and I miss it.

I miss the idiocy of it all. I dread the day I can’t drink five pints and not sleep through the night. How long will it be before bladder control is just a distant fantasy; before the tufts in my ears try to entwine with the hairs in my nostrils? Why don’t I look forward to the same things? Once doing things to excess was more than enough for me. My body was my target and my temple was the pub.

I never used to think twice about climbing up into the third-floor bathroom window, seven pints of Old Roger to the bad – or not that is until John fell legs astride a brick wall from forty feet, shattering his pelvis in five places and acquiring an impressive set of testicles the size of grapefruits.

We would gamble on anything: play three-card brag until dawn, going to the edge of fiscal sanity, playing blind and winning with a five high and not a fear in the world, laughing fit to bust on the adrenalin of it all.

Age is said to bring wisdom, prudence and the comfort of experience but if I could find it I’d trade it all in just to do something utterly daft without thinking, for the chance to make idiotic mistakes and not give a damn. How could I ever think that getting out of my head and tobogganing off a ski-jump could be anything other than fun?

I swallowed two aspirins and a glass of Alka Seltzer and hobbled down to the kitchen. As I waited for the kettle to boil I perused Mr Unknown’s ditty with a jaundiced eye.

Nobody grows old living a number of years, people grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, distrust, fear and despair … these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whether seventy or sixteen, there is in every being’s heart the love of wonder, the sweet amazement of the stars and star-like things and thoughts, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing child-like appetite for what is next, and the joy and game of life.

I was contemplating my own unfailing child-like appetite when the phone rang and John asked if I was going flying. I said no, I had work to do and replaced the receiver. Then I looked at the blue sky and the clouds and thought of wafting through them, rising effortlessly in their swirling cores, heart jumping at the sudden partial collapse of the canopy, and I looked at my computer screen and the book I was reviewing and thought, ‘Sod it, I’ll get old some other day.’ I grabbed my paraglider and headed for the door.

When I returned there was a light blinking on my answer machine and I pressed the button to hear Ray Delaney tell me he had an idea and that I should ring him at once. I rang him in Holland and he answered first time and said he had a cunning plan. My heart sank.

‘Is that so?’ I said in a wary voice. ‘OK, what is it this time?’

‘Ah ha, you’ll love this. We need to talk,’ he said.

‘We are talking. Come on, spit it out.’

‘Right, well, you know your idea about having a tick list?’

‘Yes …’

‘Well, I was just thinking …’

‘Not always a good thing as I recall …’

‘We’ve done a classic ice route: Bridalveil. OK? We want to do something on El Cap or Lotus Flower Tower or both, so that’s a rock route …’ He paused. ‘But we haven’t really got a mountain route, have we?’

‘Well, I thought that was because we wanted to give up mountaineering,’ I said, patiently.

‘No, no, we’re going to do that after we’ve completed the tick list.’

‘We’re going to try that huge ice cascade in Nepal. What’s that if it’s not mountaineering?’

‘It’s an ice line. It starts twenty minutes’ walk from a bar and ends with a walk down to a village.’

‘Exactly. The perfect mountain route.’

‘It’s not a mountain. It’s just a bloody hillside. It’s an ice climb. Anyway, that’s not the point. I was looking at this video the other day and I thought that’s it, we’ll go and do the ’38 route on the North Face of the Eiger.’

‘What? Are you mad?’

‘No, listen. I’ll send you this video. It was filmed live over three days last September when two Swiss parties climbed the face. They had helmet cameras and some fixed camera positions and it looked brilliant. More than that, it didn’t look hard at all.’

‘That’s because you were sitting in your living room drinking beer,’ I suggested.

‘Come on, Joe. You always said you wanted to do it. Remember on Ama Dablam, ten years ago, we said we were going to do it.’

‘Sort of …’

‘You said it was the greatest route in the world. You said you would regret it if you never even tried it, never even walked to the foot of it and had a sniff …’

‘I must have been drunk. It’s that Nepalese whisky …’

‘You were walking down the track to Lukla, sober as a judge.’

‘Ray, we’re forty, fat and fearful.’

‘We can do it. If we get good conditions and the weather is fine, I know we can do it. If the rock is dry it’s not technically hard …’

‘There seem to be an awful lot of “if’s” around all of a sudden,’ I said.

‘Now you’re just being negative …’

‘I thought I was being sensible.’

‘Listen, just think about it, okay? I’ll send you the video, have a look, and think about it.’

‘Nothing to think about, kid,’ I muttered. ‘The tick list was about having fun, about doing them and walking away. The Eiger isn’t fun.’

‘It could be. The video is in the post, give me a ring,’ Ray said and promptly put the phone down.
The scheming little bugger!
I thought and wandered up to the office, trying not to think about it. A copy of Peter and Leni Gillman’s superb biography of George Mallory,
The Wildest Dream
, still lay on my desk. I had finished writing a piece for the back cover having struggled to find the words that would do justice to this considerable and thought-provoking book which told so much more about the man than a history of his Everest expeditions would ever tell.

A finely wrought and meticulously detailed biography of Mallory that seeks to answer far more questions than whether he reached the summit of Everest. It is at once compelling and evocative, resonant of a bygone era when dreams went unsullied by the pressures of modern life.
The Wildest Dream
reveals a passionate man who climbed from the heart. It is rare indeed to find someone like Mallory, who so wholeheartedly believed there was no dream that must not be dared and whose life stretched to the very end.

I saved the writing and e-mailed it to Peter Gillman. I added a note congratulating him and Leni on such a fine work and said I felt sure it deserved to win the Boardman Tasker Prize. As I was about to place the book on my bookshelf I saw a copy of Heinrich Harrer’s
The White Spider.
 Beside it was Dougal Haston’s autobiography
In High Places.
There was an extensive account of his ascent of the direct Harlin Route on the north face of the Eiger during which John Harlin had died. I recalled that Peter Gillman and Chris Bonington had been covering the story of the climb for the
Daily Telegraph
. Chris climbed on the face as the climbing photographer and Peter wrote the story. He later collaborated with Haston to write
Eiger Direct
, a thrilling account of the ascent of the Harlin Route
.
I spotted it sandwiched between Harrer’s and Haston’s books on the shelf. I have hundreds of mountaineering books stuffed haphazardly onto bookshelves ringing my attic office. The chaos of moving house had meant that none of the books had been shelved in any particular order or arranged by subject, author name or title. So it was with some surprise that I saw that there were twelve books stacked side by side, all either histories of the Eiger or with a direct account of an Eiger climb or epic struggle prominent in their contents. I thought of what Ray had said on the phone that afternoon.

‘Come on, Joe. You always said you wanted to do it.’

And he was right, of course. It had always been one of my most cherished dreams. The Eiger, its literature and its history had always been at the heart of why I had started climbing and what I thought climbing should be: bold, committing and inspirational. It wasn’t the hardest or the highest. It was simply ‘The Eiger’. The very mention of the name made my heart beat faster. The seminal mountain, a metaphorical mountain that represented everything that defines mountaineering – a route I had dreamed of climbing for my entire adult life.

I used to daydream about the great climbs through university lectures and seminars, hacking my way up ice fields and climbing boldly over roofs of granite thousands of feet above pristine glaciers. Then came the day when I was sitting on the summits of these dreams and they had become real, ordinary – evaporating like dew in the sun, never to be recalled in quite the same addictive, compulsive way again. If I ever climbed the Eiger then my greatest dream would evaporate too.
No
, I told myself,
don’t crush the dream.
It’s safer that way.

I have always been a poor liar and the lie did not sit comfortably. I should have admitted that I was not good enough. I should have said I was scared of it, but I never did – even though there was an element of truth in both thoughts. Now as I looked at the group of Eiger books I wondered whether I had subconsciously stacked them like that because I knew that one day I might need to read them again.

There was a passage in Peter and Leni Gillman’s book in which they quoted Mallory’s article for the
Alpine Journal
describing his ascent of Mont Blanc:

As they toiled up the final snowfield to the summit, Mallory was afraid of an anticlimax, but then he was suffused with an uplifting awareness that even this most arduous stretch was part of the whole experience.
‘The dream stretched to the very end.’
Once again Mallory had invoked the idea of the dream to describe his aims and goals. He ended with a passage using the construct of the dream.

‘One must conquer, achieve, get to the top: one must know the end to be convinced that one can win the end – to know there’s no dream that mustn’t be dared … Is this the summit, crowning the day? How cool and how quiet! We’re not exultant: but delighted, joyful: soberly astonished … Have we vanquished an enemy? None but ourselves …’

I was struck by the familiarity of his ideas, remembering a time as a young, egotistic and overly ambitious alpinist when I had thought in similar terms. It often seemed, on later reflection, that I had spent so many hours and days dreaming about these gilded climbs that when the eventual summit was attained, the route ticked off in the guide-book, it was as if I had subconsciously willed it to happen. On some ascents I would find myself privately asking ‘
Am I really doing this?
’ as I looked at a friend struggle up a strenuous golden granite finger crack. Sometimes I would come across a soaring book-end corner or a steep icy overhang and be surprised to find that it looked so familiar and so exactly right. It was not a sense of
déjà vu
but rather an uncanny feeling that I had been led to this place, to this uplifting experience. That this was what I was meant to do. It felt right.